Thursday, April 21, 2011
I have a Google News alert set up for wireless broadband related news.  I see dozens of stories a day.  Something about this one caught my eye: "Man brings broadband network to rural Virginia."  Perhaps it's my fondly-held roots reaching back to Appalachia.  Maybe I just wondered how the story could be about a "man" and not a "company" or "coalition."  Whatever it was, I couldn't help but read more. 

I'm glad I did, too.  For starters, I (like most readers, I imagine) got a good chuckle out of Dennis Hunt's quotes, replete with words like "yonder," "gotta," and of course, "momma."  But beyond that, it's a fascinating story of individual determination, ingenuity, and good old fashioned entrepreneurial spirit.

Dennis Hunt was told that providing high-speed broadband to his community simply wasn't profitable.  When he made attempts to buy broadband services from the nearest ISP, he was plainly told that there was no money it for them.  They couldn't turn a profit piping packets up the mountainside to the few hundred scattered homes in the hills.  But Dennis wanted to prove them wrong.

His ingenuity is astounding, and I'll simply leave it to the original reporter to tell that story.  If  you have not already, click here to see pictures and descriptions of Dennis' 190-foot tall cellular tower which Dennis, now in his 60's, climbs regularly to service. 

But what I find remarkable is, first, the scalability of his project and, second, what it could mean for broadband industry.  First, scalability.  The article notes that Dennis is providing fixed wireless broadband for nearly half what his competitor, AT&T does.  But, the business-minded person will also note that Dennis does all of the work himself, bypassing expensive insurance costs for the dangerous tower-climbing job.  Then again, micro-enterprise doesn't always have to be scalable.  That's the advantage of it.  When the income of the entrepreneur is the greatest expense, business can compete on a much different level.

But, though Dennis can compete on a high level with AT&T, he cannot compete on a large scale level.  This brings the question: does Dennis' story have any impact on the broadband industry?  To be frank: is this news story really news at all?  As-is, the answer is no.  But he has proven a concept that might have larger ramifications.  Smaller ISP's were bought out decades ago and merged into larger, allegedly more efficient conglomerates.  Dennis seems to be going the opposite direction.  Does a niche exist in rural broadband that can be reached and served economically by micro-enterprise where the big 3 network providers (AT&T, Verizon, & Sprint) cannot justify the expense to reach the customer?  Only time will tell.  

Labels: ATT, Fixed Wireless Broadband, Rural Broadband

posted by Unknown at 11:44 AM Link to this Article  0 Comments

Monday, April 18, 2011
Among the latest misguided arguments is the recent scuffle over wireless vs. fiber in Australia, where proponents of wireless broadband fear that the national emphasis on a fiber-backed network will impede their mission to provide wireless broadband to the rural areas.  And this is misguided why, you might ask?  Because, the fiber back-bone built out by the NBN will serve to bolster wireless broadband, not impede it. 

The truth is, without fiber, wireless would be weaker, if it were viable at all.

Wireless is a local-loop solution.
To get data from New York to Los Angeles, packets ride on the back of copper cables, twisted pairs, and most recently: fiber optic cables.  Where does wireless come in?  Wireless performs best moving those packets from the terrestrial network to the end user.  Network engineers agree that moving data thousands of miles from hub to hub is the easy part.  But it's the last leg of the journey that gets tricky.  Often called the "local loop" or the "last mile," from network hub to end-users can be costly and time consuming to deploy when trenches and cables are required.  This is where wireless broadband comes in most handy.

But wireless travels at the same speed, right?Theoretically, radio waves travel at the speed of light.  And, if you consider the latency added by fiber optic refraction or copper cable resistance, perhaps wireless signal would win in the land-speed record.  But there are some major challenges in an end-to-end wireless network.  First, spectrum limits the total amount of data that can be transmitted.  If you imagine each distinct range of spectrum as one usable "cable" over which to transmit data, then the nation would have fewer than 1000 cables over which to transmit data.  Compare that to the current grid of over 100,000 discreet channels of fiber and cable which span the country and you can see wireless suffers a great bandwidth deficit. 


The shortest distance from A to B...More importantly, however, wireless (for the most part) is a line-of-site medium.  This means that the simple curvature of the earth presents a problem, as a truly straight line from New York to Los Angeles would actually fall over a thousand feet below the earth's surface.  Bouncing off the atmosphere is a precision game and hardly reliable.  Not to mention, over long distances, interference from other radio sources (storms, personal devices, and the sun, to name a few) degrade the signal.

So, to move a data packet from end-to-end without ever hitting a wire requires the use of tools called repeaters.  Repeaters simply pick up the signal and re-transmit it immediately.  When you add the computing time required by each repeater, even if micro-seconds, that would be required to reach New York from Los Angeles, the latency of the signal is now far greater than a pure fiber network.  Of course, fiber hits repeaters of sorts, too.  The difference is, however, that fiber suffers little-to-no degradation of signal in between.  What's being repeated is a pure packet, unadultered by solar flares or car stereos.  The net impact of incremental degradation as it repeats hundreds of times is the net effect of playing the telephone game with grade-school children. 


Can't we all just get along?The truth is, without a strong terrestrial network, fixed wireless broadband is not much of a solution all by itself.  Wireless broadband is a local loop solution, more cost effective and quicker to deploy in most situations than its wired alternatives.  But for the long distances, terrestrial networks are our most valued partner.

Labels: Copper Cable, Fiber Optic, Fixed Wireless Broadband, NBN, radio waves, Rural Broadband

posted by Unknown at 4:34 AM Link to this Article  0 Comments

Wednesday, April 6, 2011
The thought of a newcomer to the broadband market endeavoring to create a new, nation-wide network of wireless broadband service on a previously unused spectrum is quite spectacular.  It's encouraging to see new innovation continuing to take place in an already mature and competitive market.  But that is exactly what LightSquared intends to do.  So, why are there lawsuits pending to stop them?

The spectrum that LightSquared intends to use is very near the commonly-used spectrum for GPS signal and devices.  While the FCC and LightSquared both contend that there will be no ill effects, GPS companies such as Trimble Navigation Ltd. and organizations such as the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association fear that the nearby signal emitted by terrestrial devices would carry a far greater intensity than that of satellite-driven GPS, and therefore cause signal interruption for the GPS devices. 

If the nay-sayers are right, up to 40% of the commercial and private aircraft flying today could find themselves with compromised navigation systems due to the signal bleed.  Moreover, the majority of public safety responders such as fire trucks, police, and rescue operations will be affected.  Municipal departments becoming more and more reliant on GPS technology could be affected.  Even simple, private GPS units in consumers' cars might begin to experience signal outages when competing with the nearby signal of LightSquared's network.

But for me, here is what the problem boils down to: whose problem is this?  The spectrum in question is not "new" per se.  It's been commercially available, even if largely unused, since before the GPS services became ubiquitous.  Did the manufacturers of such devices take the lack of nearby signal for granted as they developed their products?  Was noise-canceling and fine-tuning overlooked on the presumption that competing signal did not exist at the time?  And, if it could be argued that it is this lack of engineering that threatens GPS, not the newcomer to the wireless market, then what role does the FCC need to play in protecting the already-deployed devices?

Signal competition is nothing new to fixed wireless broadband.  Accel Networks has had to cope with this reality in the existing spectrum of wireless signal.  Our specially engineered antennas are carefully provisioned to provide excellent reception in the harshest signal environments.  Are GPS manufacturers exempt from such engineering challenges? 

Labels: Fixed Wireless Broadband, spectrum, wireless signal

posted by Unknown at 6:38 AM Link to this Article  0 Comments